


Actual Books Probably Still for Sale // Box of Secrets

by marginalia



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Community: sunday100, F/M, Wingfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-09-22
Updated: 2003-09-22
Packaged: 2018-10-11 02:37:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10453083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marginalia/pseuds/marginalia
Summary: 1: Sunday100 McSweeney's List Challenge.2: No known challenge.





	

**Author's Note:**

> 1: Sunday100 McSweeney's List Challenge.  
> 2: No known challenge.

**Actual Books Probably Still for Sale on the One-Dollar Carts at the Strand Bookstore in NYC**

At first Oz caught the scent of Willow on her skin, but then he smelled her, rich and dark with earth, and crackling with something that made him dizzy with wind and sky.

He fled her, drove without thinking, tearing himself from her pull, driving on to cities where overpowering flash and color and scent struggled to push her from his mind.

He finally gave in one afternoon, flipping through the cheap books, self imposed sensory overload preventing more than the occasional word to slip through.

_Vitiate. Thaumaturgy. Quiet valiancy._

_Wings._

He turned back west, compelled by her otherworldly strength.

::

**Box of Secrets**

When he met her, she was to him as a box of secrets, a different one revealed each time she was opened, each time he loved her deep and quiet until she was pliant enough for a secret to spin free.

Little secrets floated to the top first - the scent of her mother before she got sick, her collection of elephants, the shape of the moon the first time she kissed a girl. Secrets crept out slowly, but he had great respect for the timing of things, the waxing and waning of this girl.

Deeper secrets she told first to the wolf - the sound of her father on the stairs after her mother died, the eyes of the last boy to touch her sly in the shadows, the wings. She'd sing her secrets soft through the bars of his cage, sing them soft in words none but the wolf would understand.

She sang the wings, emptied herself of secrets, and flew, frightened, but free. She spiraled towards the sliver of moon until she heard his voice, low and gentle, singing her secrets back to her.

Alighting beside him in the dark, she kissed him and took back her history transformed.


End file.
